Agnès Thurnauer

Biography

Franco-swiss artist, born in 1962.
Lives and works in Paris (France)

Through her paintings, sculptures, and installations Agnès Thurnauer focuses her practice around language. Thus, writing is often present in her pictorial praxis leading the viewer to emancipate endlessly of his own reading. This plastic quality of language can be experienced with her three dimensions sculptures made of casts of letters on different scales letting the gaze and the body involved. For Agnès Thurnauer, the relation with artworks induces reciprocity. If artworks reads the world, it is up to everyone to make our own reading. This shared language is at the core of our society and gives art a powerful poetic and political function.

Agnès Thurnauer's work was revealed to the public by a solo show at the Palais de Tokyo in 2003. Since then, she has exhibited at the Centre Pompidou (Paris) ; Angers Museum of Fine Arts ; Unterlinden Museum (Colmar) and at the Château de Montsoreau-Collection Philippe Méaille, among many other venues.
She has also shown her work in Belgium at the SMAK (Ghent) ; in the United States at the Seattle Art Museum and the Edgewood Gallery (Yale), in Brazil at the CCBB (Rio) and in many biennials and art centres: the Lyon Biennale, the Cambridge Biennial, the Kunsthalle Bratislava, and the Yermilov center Kharkiev ...

In 2020, Agnès Thurnauer set up a permanent work, the Matrices Chromatiques, at the Musée de l'Orangerie.
In September 2021, she has installed a major public commission from the French Ministry of Culture in Ivry-sur-Seine.
In 2022, she had 4 monographic exhibitions, including the Lam museum in Villeneuve d'Asq and the Matisse museum in Nice.
And in autumn 2024, her work will be exhibited at the Musée de l'histoire de l'immigration in Paris and at the National Museum of World Writing Systems in South Korea.

A new monograph has just been published by JRP Ringer, with essays by Cécile Debray, Dean Daderko and Elisabeth Lebovici.

Agnès Thurnauer works regularly with writers, philosophers and poets for publications and artist's books (Michèle Cohen-Halimi, Tiphaine Samoyault, Rod Mengham, Anne Portugal, Francis Cohen...)

Her works joined many private and public collections (Centre Georges-Pompidou, Musée des Beaux-arts de Nantes, Musée des Beaux-arts d'Angers, musée d'Unterlinden, FMAC, FRAC (Auvergne, Bretagne, Ile de France...).

Selected works

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Michel Rein, Paris

Pariétales

Oct. 12 - Nov. 25, 2023

Michel Rein, Brussels

How deep is your love?

Jan. 20 - Mar. 05, 2022

Michel Rein, Paris

La Traverser

Nov. 28, 2020 - Jan. 23, 2021

Museum exhibitions

MO.CO, Montpellier, 2024

Centre Pompidou Metz, 2024

Musée d'art moderne de Fontevraud, Fontevraud l'Abbaye, France, 2023

Musée Matisse, Nice, France, 2022

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Parade, une scène française. Collection Laurent Dumas MO.CO, Montpellier, 2024

Lacan, l'exposition, (cur. Marie-Laure Bernadac et Bernard Marcadé), Centre Pompidou Metz, 2024, ph. Marc Domage

Aliénor L'Ouragane, Musée d'art moderne de Fontevraud, Fontevraud l'Abbaye, France, 2023 © Margot Montigny

On se retrouve chez toi (cur. Claudine Grammont), Musée Matisse, Nice, France, 2022

Près d'elle, Librairie Métamorphose, Paris, France, 2022

Oral Texte, Fondation d'entreprise Pernod Ricard, 2022

Fernande Olivier et Pablo Picasso, dans l'intimité du Bateau-Lavoir, Musée de Montmartre, Paris, 2022

A comme Boa (cur. Sebastien Delot & Grégoire Prangé), LaM, Musée d'art moderne et contemporain, Lille Metropole, Villeneuve-d'Ascq, 2022, ph: Nicolas DeWitte

Matrices/Assises/Ivry, Ivry-sur-Seine, 2021

Hahaha. L'humour de l'art, Kanal - Centre Pompidou x ING Art Center, Bruxelles, Belgique, 2021

Rrose c'est la Life, Centre d'Art Contemporain Bouvet Ladubay, Saumur, France, 2021

Napoléon ? Encore !, cur. Eric de Chassey, Musée de l'Armée, Invalides, Paris, France, 2021

Matrices chromatiques, Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris, France, 2020

Land and language, Fondation Thalie, Brussels, Belgium, 2020

Land and Language, Kunsthalle Bratislava, Slovakia, 2016

Nouvel accrochage des collections, musée Unterlinden, Colmar, France, 2018

Thurnauer à Angers, Musée des beaux-arts d'Angers, France, 2009

Notre histoire, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France, 2006

Biennale de Lyon, France, 2005

BIS - Biennale de Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, 2018

Sculpture in the Close, Jesus College, Cambridge, UK, 2017

Matrice / Assise (Portrait de femme), Private collection, France, 2017

Matrice / Assise (from A to A), Private collection, Greece, 2017

Préfigurer, Galerie Fernand Léger, Ivry-sur-Seine, France, 2016

Enfermement, musée d'art et d'histoire de Saint Denis, France, 2019

Land and Language, Kunsthalle Bratislava, Slovakia, 2016

Une histoire de la peinture- collection Philippe Méaille, Chateau de Montsoreau, Anjou, France, 2016

Women taking over Women artists from the Pompidou Center, Seattle Art Museum, USA, 2012

Elles, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France, 2009

Parcours Saint-Germain, Paris, France, 2009

Francine Picabia, CCCOD, Tours, France, 2008

Bien faite, mal faite, pas faite, SMAK, Ghent, Belgium, 2007

Moving Numbers, CNDC, Angers, France, 2017

Videos

EXHIBITION

Agnes Thurnauer's exhibition "La traverser", Michel Rein, Paris, 2021

Matisse/Thurnauer #1

Agnès Thurnauer's exhibition « On se retrouve chez toi » at Musée Matisse, Nice, 2022, curated by Claudine Grammont

Matisse/Thurnauer #3

Agnès Thurnauer's exhibition « On se retrouve chez toi » at Musée Matisse, Nice, 2022, curated by Claudine Grammont

Matisse/Thurnauer #5

Agnès Thurnauer's exhibition « On se retrouve chez toi » at Musée Matisse, Nice, 2022, curated by Claudine Grammont

Performance of Anna Chirescu and Alexandra Grimal, Michel Rein, Paris, 2023

CONVERSATION

Conversation with artist Agnès Turnauer, Cécile Debray and Clément dirié, Michel rein, Paris, 2023

INTERVIEW

Interview by Connaissance des arts on the theme "restitute or interpret ? »